Warrior Girl Unearthed

by Angeline Boulley

Grave Injustice begins with a NAGPRA success story. In 1999, after eight years of negotiations, Jemez Pueblo repatriated almost two thousand Pecos ancestors and their sacred items from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. An archaeologist had excavated these human beings and their belongings in the early 1900s for academic research. More than seventy years later, they made the return trip home in a semitruck. Their descendants had to create a new ceremony for reburial because the community had never experienced the need to return ancestors to the earth.

Committing atrocities and calling it the will of a supreme entity wasn’t just an America thing.

They came for our land, women, timber, water, fish, game, spirituality, and children. Anything we value, the Zhaaganaash claim for themselves.